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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff) LATEST POSTS:
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- The Borrowed Robe: How Antisemitism Dresses in Each Age’s Virtue
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- Dennis Prager Through Randall Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
- What is a ‘Received Idea’?
- Jordan Bardella: The Manufacture of Normality
- Everyone Became Television: Bourdieu’s Warning and the 2026 Iran War
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- Bernard Haykel: A Life Between the Text and the Gun
- Walker Connor (1926-2017)
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- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
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* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
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Category Archives: Literature
William T. Vollmann: An American Life in Excess
On the morning of June 23, 2026, in a coffee shop on a shaded Sacramento street, a dying man sat working at a laptop beside an empty mug. He had arrived early. When his interviewer approached, William Tanner Vollmann (b. … Continue reading
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Roland Barthes: A Biography
On the afternoon of February 25, 1980, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) left a lunch in the Marais. François Mitterrand (1916-1996), then a candidate for the French presidency, had hosted a table of writers and intellectuals. The Socialist politician collected such men … Continue reading
Posted in France, Literature
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Michel Houellebecq: A Life
On September 17, 2002, Michel Houellebecq (b. 1956) sat in the 17th chamber of the Palais de Justice in Paris, the courtroom France reserves for press offenses, and faced four Muslim organizations, the Mosque of Paris among them, plus the … Continue reading
Posted in France, Islam, Literature
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Anthony Lane: A Life
On the morning of January 30, 2024, a memo went out to the staff of The New Yorker. David Remnick (b. 1958), the editor, announced that Justin Chang, the film critic of the Los Angeles Times, would join the magazine … Continue reading
Posted in Hollywood, Journalism, Literature
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Author Philip Gourevitch
In May 1995 a thirty-three-year-old American freelancer steps through a massacre site in Rwanda and his foot comes down on a skull. The dead lie so thick on the ground that he cannot avoid them. The killing ended almost a … Continue reading
Posted in Genocide, Journalism, Literature
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Sana Krasikov and the Price of Belief
The girl is eight years old when she comes off the plane at John F. Kennedy. She arrives with her parents, her older sister, and her grandparents, out of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, released by a system that has … Continue reading
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The Place That Comforts: A Life of Naama Goldstein
She was sixteen the year she filled a brown notebook and titled it The Purple Book. The school was a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem, the kind where the creative work of a year amounted to a personal essay, a … Continue reading
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Binnie Kirshenbaum
Binnie Kirshenbaum (b. 1964) sits in the living room of her West Village apartment and explains how she turned the worst years of her life into a novel. Photographs crowd the walls. Thrift-store finds fill the shelves. She tells her … Continue reading
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Mitchell James Kaplan
A man sits in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The decade is the early 1980s. He has come to France after college and stayed, working as a translator and an English teacher, and he reads the … Continue reading
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Molly Jong-Fast
On a Monday morning in March 2005, a reporter climbs to an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and finds Molly Jong-Fast (b. 1978) at twenty-six, a cigarette going, a yawn breaking across a sentence, sharp through both. She lives … Continue reading
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